David Baxter, Executive Director,
The Urban Futures Institute, on the Value of Waterfront.

"In Vancouver, access to waterfront is a defining component of value in urban housing."

With 35% of the average household's consumption dollars spent on housing, a home is the single biggest purchase most people will ever make. A home's value is ultimately determined by two factors: the home as a physical place, and where the home is. The importance of "where" is summed up in the old real estate adage "location, location, location". The reason for the three "locations" is that there are three dimensions to location , the neighbours, accessibility, and the neighbourhood.

When you have a home, you get the neighbours, the people who live in the rest of the building, or the rest of the block. Considerate neighbours who endeavour to maintain and ensure the value of their homes enhance the value of yours as well.

When you have a home, you also have transportation costs. The relationship between transportation costs and home values explains why two identical dwellings in identical neighbourhoods in different parts of a city have different prices. A home that is easily accessible to downtown, to shopping, entertainment, parks, waterfront, and recreation is worth a lot more than an identical dwelling that is on a crowded freeway away from it all.

When you have a home, you also have a neighbourhood. It is the neighbourhood more than anything else that explains the difference in value between homes throughout a metropolitan area. At one level, the neighbourhood is defned by the design and characteristics of the structures in it, as these set the tone of the area and give it its image and "feel" as a community. At a deeper, fundamental level, the neighbourhood is defned by its natural environment, its views and vistas, its green spaces, and its waterfront.

What is it about access to waterfront that gives so much value to housing? In every metropolitan region, access to water and to waterfront has become a defning component of value in urban housing. In Seattle, Toronto, Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Vancouver, waterfront land is being reclaimed from industrial uses, is being made accessible to people, and is becoming the defning feature of communities. Waterfront offers uniqueness to homes in its vicinity, giving access to vistas, openness, activity, change, movement, diversity, and texture that no landscape can.

While structures can be duplicated and neighbours and transportation cost changed, the waterfront remains, providing uniqueness and value to homes in waterfront locations. For all reasonable purposes, the supply of waterfront is fxed, its limits defned by the interface between land and water. As this region's population grows, the amount of waterfront will remain the same. Homes that have access to waterfront are, each year, going to be an ever-smaller portion of the region's housing stock. It is this key factor that will continue to defne and protect their value.